Opinion Contributor

Obama’s crisis of credibility

The only thing Obama can be counted on to do is make his tee time, the author writes. | AP Photo

By KEITH KOFFLER | 10/11/13 5:03 AM EDT

President Barack Obama is like a novice flier thrust into the cockpit of a 747. He’s pushing buttons, flipping switches and radioing air traffic control, but nothing’s happening. The plane is just slowly descending on its own, and while it may or may not crash, it at least doesn’t appear to be headed to any particularly useful destination.

Obama’s ineffectiveness, always a hallmark of his presidency, has reached a new cruising altitude this year. Not even a year into his second term, he looks like a lame duck and quacks like a lame duck. You guessed it — he’s a lame duck.

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On the world stage, despite Obama’s exertions, Iran’s centrifuges are still spinning, the Israelis and Palestinians remain far apart, Bashar Assad is still in power, the Taliban are gaining strength and Iraq is gripped by renewed violence.

At home, none of Obama’s agenda has passed this year. Republicans aren’t bowing to him in the battle of the budget, and much of the GOP seems uninterested in House Speaker John Boehner’s vision of some new grand bargain with the president.

Obama has something worse on his hands than being hated. All presidents get hated. But Obama is being ignored. And that’s because he has no credibility.

A president enters office having earned a certain stock of political capital just for getting elected. He then spends it down, moving his agenda forward, until he collects a fresh supply by getting reelected.

But political capital is only the intangible substrate that gives a president his might. His presidency must also be nourished by credibility — a sense he can be trusted, relied upon and feared — to make things happen.

A president enters office with a measure of credibility. After all, he seemed at least trustworthy enough to get elected. But unlike political capital, credibility must be built in office. Otherwise, it is squandered.

Obama has used every credibility-busting method available to eviscerate any sense that he can be counted on. He’s dissimulated, proven his unreliability, ruled arbitrarily and turned the White House into a Chicago-style political boiler room. His credibility has been sapped with his political opponents, a public that thinks him incompetent, our allies, who don’t trust him, and, even worse, our enemies, who don’t fear him.

There’s not going to be any grand bargain on the budget this year. Republicans are not only miles from the president ideologically — they’re not going to trust him with holding up his end of the bargain. If they had a president they thought they could do business with, their spines might be weakening more quickly in the current budget impasse and they would be looking for an exit.

There are the unkept promises like closing Guantanamo, halving the deficit during his first term and bringing unemployment down below 8 percent as a result of the 2009 stimulus. Then there are the moments when one has to conclude that Obama could not have possibly been telling the truth.